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Intense and thoughtful ranting from the OLPC front

Ivan Krstić has made his way into this blog before. As OLPC’s former director of security architecture and one closely involved with their Peru rollout, his posts offered great insights into just how the XO worked (or was supposed to work) on the backend.

Now he, like Walter Bender, has left OLPC and posted one heck of a rant on Tuesday. Note that the language is a bit rough (Krstić pulls no punches and is obviously angry, so this probably isn’t a site to share with your middle school computer classes; for the rest of us, it’s quite a read).

Krstić, despite being able to run circles around most of us in all things computing, including Linux kernel programming, is no open source fundamentalist (as Nicholas Negroponte has called those who object to porting the Sugar user interface to Windows). However, here is his take on recent attention to Negroponte’s moves towards a Windows deployment:

OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor.

Hôtel proche de la clinique du Val d'Ouest

Firefox OS heading for Africa — and the U.S. too

Orange announced a $40 “Klif” Firefox OS phone for Africa, and Mozilla says it’s working with Verizon Wireless and others on Firefox OS feature phones.
There’s still no evidence that Mozilla’s HTML-focused Firefox OS has made much of a dent in the world smartphone market, where it has been focused on low-end devices sold primarily to emerging markets. Yet, Firefox OS still leads the way among upstart, Linux-based mobile operating systems, and will soon be available in more than 40 markets, this year, on a total of 17 smartphones, according to its latest stats. Meanwhile, the very first Tizen (Samsung Z1) and Ubuntu (BQ Aquaris E4.5) phones have only just shipped, and Jolla’s Sailfish OS based Jolla phones are still mostly limited to Europe.

Why large companies use open source ERP

The main reason larger companies use open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is because they are cheaper and easier to customize.